Space Planning

The Data

What information is in the data warehouse now?

The right sidebar shows the Projects in MicroStrategy and the Data Marts within each. Reports in MicroStrategy pull data from the Data Marts, so you can get a sense from the table to the right of the kinds of analyses that can be done.

In general, the data warehouse holds aggregated data that can be placed into reports and analyses to support strategic decision-making.

The Brandeis data warehouse is still in its early stages of development. To see the current status of Projects that are already in the data warehouse and future Projects in the pipeline, please go the the Road Map page.

How far back in time does the data go?

The answer to this question depends on the data mart. For example, information about the number of degrees Brandeis has awarded to students has trustworthy data from the 1986-87 year and later. Class Enrollment information, however, goes back to Fall 1983 with good data.

Information about the date ranges of each data mart will be provided soon.

What's a data warehouse vs. a project vs. a data mart?

There is only one Data Warehouse and it holds all the data.

Inside the data warehouse, information is grouped by business units such as Finance, Admissions, and Students & Enrollment. These large groupings are called Projects.

Since a single Project can cover a lot of territory, data inside each Project are clustered around sets of measurable metrics. Examples include student credit hours earned, faculty FTE by Department, YTD actual expenditures vs. budgeted, mean SAT score of an applicant. Behind the scenes, the data warehouse clustering is done using something called a StarSchema. We use a friendlier term: Data Mart.

What data will be added and when? Who decides what data gets added next?

Eventually just about everything that can inform strategy decision-making will be added to the data warehouse. It is the breadth and depth of data from disparate sources that imbues data warehouses with their value.

While the data warehouse team in LTS develops and supports the data warehouse, a separate Data Warehouse governance body determines the long-range goals and the order of future data sets to be added to the warehouse. For more information, view the Governance page.

What can I do with the data and/or reports from the data warehouse?

Depending on your privileges in the data warehouse, you can run MicroStrategy reports that have been created by subject-matter experts. The Registrar's office, for example, has created many reports that they have determined to be accurate, so you can trust the information in those reports. You can also distribute these reports internally to Brandeis community members as appropriate.

You can also run them at any time outside of the midnight-to-6:00 AM window when the data warehouse is shut down to gather the newest data from the previous day.

In many instances, you can also export the data to PDF, Excel, or other formats to perform further analysis.

What can I NOT do with the data and/or reports from the data warehouse?

Glad you asked!

You may notdistribute any of the reports to entitiesoutsideof Brandeis University.

Requests for information by survey companies, other institutes of higher education, and the government require specialized knowledge regarding narrow definitions of terms, and should be referred to OPIR at opir@brandeis.edu.